So, are you going to release?..

… the keynote speaker shared a story about a failed project. He joined the project a couple of years into the development, and the team had yet to release anything to production. He went on to detail that he was on the project another year and a half, with no production release in sight, and left the project.

This project was one of those legacy re-writes, given pretty much unlimited budget and resources, in hopes that this would produce the best possible replacement for the existing product. The project had budget, resources, executive backing and visibility, technical leadership, support from domain experts etc. etc. Yet the project was still a colossal failure. Why? It never released!

There are many reasons why you should release as soon as possible. But the main are to get a feedback from your target audience and validate your technical decisions. Both of them are extremely important at early development stage in order to confirm that you’re building what people will buy and you’re doing it right.